You made that out of paper?

Short story long: this is the reason why I haven’t been quilling, posting on my blog, or doing much of anything for the last 24 weeks:

Yep, there’s my little guy! He’s being a little stinker again today, curling up into a ball to get his picture taken.

I have been working on some non-quilling (craft space) crafts that I do hope to post in the near to not too distant future, but long story short, again: I’m just really tired. This pregnancy thing makes a girl really tired (and yea, I know I haven’t gotten to the sleep deprived part yet 🙂

I realized today that I shared this on my Facebook page, but not here, so I just though I would share it here if anyone was missing me 🙂

Well, it’s been a long time Since I’ve blogged. My craft desk has been pretty much completed since around March 20, but a lot has happened since then

We finished the desk on a Monday night, right around midnight

That week was very stressful for me at my regular job, as we started some new student testing, and I was the proctor that following Friday.

On Saturday (March 23), we had a housewarming in our house for family and friends. I was beat

The following Saturday, I went to the doctor and discovered I had shingles (stress-related). Not fun.

Since then it’s just been getting stuff together; still unpacking boxes, and I still haven’t found my rotary cutter.

Well, when push came to shove, we got it done, and I love it! One thing I discovered is that neither my husband nor I can cut a straight line (with a circular saw) to save our lives! So, without further ado, here it is!:

My computer is in the corner – this is an older picture, and I scored an additional monitor for it for $20 🙂 .

I currently have a desk light pointed to the wall (behind the computer) until I get a light made to hang overtop of it. Good thing I have a craft desk to make this!

To the left of the computer is more the business side of the desk. Here I have my printer, my paper trimmer, computer paper, and all of my envelopes and shipping supplies. I also put my silhouette there when I’m using it.

To the right of my computer is all of my quilling paper (in binders) and a small craft space. I have my sewing machine there, as well as my cutting board for cutting fabric, and my ribbon.

On the wall to the right of my computer, I put up 3 white shelves for storage. The blue boxes on top are inventory storage, the middle shelf holds my silhouette (when not in use), and the bottom shelf holds more storage boxes, as well as my sewing basket. I asked hubby what he thought of the sewing basket, and he said “it’s scary how well that matches”.

The actual craft table in the center of the room is made from two $16 bookshelves from Wal-Mart, and two beveled edge shelves from Menards. It works for now, but I think I may want to take a queue from another site and get a hollow-core door for the desktop.

As the craft table is slightly higher, my pink chair was slightly uncomfortable to sit in there, so I managed to get 3 chairs from a friend (he bought in an auction) for $10 each. 2 of them are the taller kind, so they are great to sit in. They do need to spruced up a bit, but again, what is a craft space for 🙂

So there it is! If you have any questions of something in the space, please let me know!

Well, since yesterday’s wonderful power outage, I thought for sure the desk building would be on hold for at least a week. However, my wonderful, wonderful husband created a work-around by running a long orange extension cord through our living room out to the garage! The saw worked, and didn’t dim the lights in the garage, so we had a good idea we would be safe running the saw off of that.

As we got the two 22″ wide boards cut yesterday, we began by cutting those boards into smaller pieces. We started by measuring the height of what the boards needed to be, either 26 1/2″ or 15 1/5″, depending on the board.

Then we got to work setting up the straight edge and making cuts. The first was was ok, but the second one – not so great on the chipping part.

I noticed that when hubby was sawing, he was going alot faster than he had the day before, and I suspect that might be a reason for extra chippage.

However, I also saw this on tv once: put some painters tape where your going to saw to help prevent chipping. Hubby didn’t think it would work because it was “cheap-a$$” tape (as he put it). I said oh well let’s do it anyway!

This cut actually turned out GREAT! However, I can’t give complete credit to the tape, because I did tell hubby that he looked to be going faster, so he went slow with the saw this time. So we did this on the remainder of the boards and continued until we got both of the boards cut.

Look, the boards are ACTUALLY in my basement!!!

On another note, I’m thinking of painting the white wall one of these shades of Benjamin Moore blue:

If you know me, and my love of palm trees and tropicals, you should know before even reading this sentance that I’m already leaning towards Hawaian breeze. I like it because it’s blue with just a slight hint of green. I think it will look good with all of the natural wood colors. The other one I like, as crazy as the name is, is Grandma’s Sweater. The name reminds me of a blue cable-knit turtleneck sweater that my mom would always wear. 🙂

So that’s where we’re at with the end of this day. Hoping to have more soon!

First things first, we (hubby) had to “prepare” the sawhorses by adding some wood to the top of them. I guess your supposed to use a 2×4, but we didn’t have any, so we just used some scraps we had for now.

Next, we (hubby, again) had to change the blade in the saw. He picked up a blade for laminate, it has either 120 or 150 teeth on it, for about $7.99. I was expecting this to be more expensive, but I’m ok with that price tag! We decided to go with using the circular saw rather than the table saw because he knows how to use the circular saw better.

After that, we were finally ready to cut! We started by measuring out the 22″ piece that we needed, then added an additional 1 1/2″ to that to put our straight edge (the extra 1 1/2″ is the distance between the straight edge and the blade).

Here we go on the first cut!

One cut down, many more to go!

Now, I would show you more pictures, except about halfway through the second 22″ cut, the power went out. This was when we learned the hard way that the garage, the kitchen lights, and the upstairs bathroom are ALL on a 15 amp breaker. Guess we will have to figure something out here!

Well, here it is! This is what will be my new craft space in our new house!

Isn’t it a pretty little chunk of the basement! The back wall (behind where the door is open) is about 10 feet wide, and the side wall (of space that I’ll be using) is about 12 feet wide, so I have a really good space to work with. I’m not sure how happy my husband is, because I think he may have thought he would be getting the whole 900 sq. ft. basement as his “Man Cave” and my craft space would be in the sun room, here (please don’t mind the mess, we’re still unpacking!):

Granted, who wouldn’t LOVE to craft in that space with that view! And all the sunlight (on sunny days)! However, the sunlight that warms my face would also be detrimental to my quilling paper, so it just can’t stay there.

Also, I think his tone might have changed when I won this at work with $40 worth of tickets for his man cave. It goes nicely with the PS3 he got for Christmas.

Well, as some of you may not have known, back probably 6-9 months ago I saw a pin on Pinterest for the $5 savings plan. Since we were in the process of looking for a new house, and I knew I wouldn’t want one that didn’t have an adequate crafting space, and I knew I would be getting that crafting space at some time, I decided to start following the $5 savings plan to have money to furnish my craft space when we finally did get a house. The basis of the plan is that any time you get a $5, put it away. The plan uses $5 because it accumulates faster than $1, and it’s not big enough that you would miss it, like $10 – it’s just that perfect, in between amount. So I started that plan, and ended up with $500 by the time we bought our house! I will confess, I did supplement it with $120 I made working overtime a few days at work, but even if I hadn’t done that, i still would have a decent amount of money to do something with 🙂 Sidenote: There’s also a 52 week savings plan that I came across that looks like it might be good, also. Go search that one out if your interested!

Also during the time of searching for a house, I was pinning like crazy of good ideas for my craft storage and organization, and found that I really loved this setup by Nichol Magouirk:

After looking at her space, and finding where she got it at, I quickly found that there was NO way I could afford the $2000 – 3000 to have a space like this. I briefly considered the storage cubes from Michael’s, but they don’t really have a way to have a “corner” space (which I LOVE) and their cubes are only 14.5″ deep, which is not enough space for office supplies.

I don’t recall how I stumbled across Ana White’s website (I’m sure it had something to do with pinterest!), but I’ve been in love ever since! And wouldn’t you know, she has a plan to build a desk that is modeled after the one above!

I’m SOOOOOOOO excited to start this build! I was originally wanting to build it out of white melamine, but looking at the quality of what is available in my area, I went with an epoxy/acrylic sided birch plywood, which looks similar to the bases (but a little lighter).

I did have to do some planning on how to build this, as my desk is going to be MUCH larger than the plans, so some of this project may be building by ear. My desk is going to be about 9′ x 12′. I had to make a “visual guide” in the basement to get a better idea of what it will look like. Hubby is running an electrical line around the perimeter of the basement as there isn’t any power there.

After a bit of a snafu in getting the wood to our house, it is there, sitting in the garage, just waiting for me to start building. I would love to start this weekend, but alas, I will be spending the weekend at my sister’s house, babysitting her 4 kids while her and her hubby go to a hockey game.

One other plan that is not shown here is to build a separate “crafting table” in the center of the room. That will have to survive as another post. I hope to keep this updated as much as possible, but, as of right now, it still may be another couple of months before we actually get Internet at our house. So until then, happy crafting!